BA (Hons) Fine Art; Cardiff School of Art & Design

Gerhard Richter exhibition

I went to view the Gerhard Richter exhibition in London, where my love for chance and chaos of material was amplified. Richter has arrested the fluidity of the paint and enamel with a large sheet of glass, captivating the movement and allowing for beautiful snippets of turbulence with colours clashing aswell as blending. You can see his excitement to depict the relationship and the tension between his hand gesture and the chance created by the material’s consummate nature.

Looking closely at the artworks I felt the captivation of the paint as I was gripped and charmed by the beauty of the paint’s own delicacy and style. I was given a lot to contemplate: complimentary colours, minute patterns and extensive blocks of colour; invoking a debate as to which side of Richter’s initial relationship intent was predominantly the cause of such alluing chaos.

In the images above are of Richter’s ‘strip’ paintings where he has essentially abstracted his own abstraction and is representing the dismantling of his original paintings.

At primary sight these paintings were difficult to look at: they interfered somewhere between my eyes and mind, at times creating a headache and refusing my eyes’ attention. I thought that exhibiting them alongside the very opposing and chaotic ‘flow’ artworks, was an effective way to highlight them because of the high contrast between them: the precise and linear markings to the unpredictable and completely illogical. In terms of appropriation, I found this contrast very relative to the way I am thinking about chaos theory, with the ‘strip’ pieces suggesting the more mathematical and formative existence. Furthermore, I went on to think about an affiliation with Richter’s work and my research into the paradoxical mind, for example the exhistence of both ‘flow’ and ‘strip’ being two extremes within one space, and that they could not be arranged with the same artistic process, disallowing them to exist without Richter (paradoxical thinking not existing without a consciousness).

Finally, Richter inter-balanced 4 large sheets of glass to display reflection in a gently saturation/ slightly monochrome light. The suppression of colour betray no gesture, creating a simultaneous view of spatial division aswell as awareness, and the differentiation of colour, of which I had been beckoned by at the beginning of my journey through the gallery.

Seeing Richter’s work, particularly ‘flow’, I felt inspired and really pushed towards considering the way my artists materials can be chaotic in themselves to produce their very own abstraction, without my own energy having a large impact.